The high value of the Australian dollar in the last few years and the expansion of university places in local institutions have led to fewer Singaporeans going there to study. But with the recent decline of the Australian dollar, student recruiters expect the numbers to pick up, writes Sandra Davie for The Straits Times. Read more...

US public-university endowments, including the country’s second-wealthiest at the University of Texas, are reporting fiscal 2015 returns that fail to meet the annual industry standard, write Lauren Streib and Michael McDonald for Bloomberg. Read more...

The University of Tokyo, long considered a breeding ground for Japan’s political and business elite, is venturing into new terrain: entrepreneurship, writes Alexander Martin for The Wall Street Journal. Read more...

Vietnam will not co-operate with any foreign governments to open more universities until at least 2020, according to a new decision by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, reports VietnamNet Bridge. Read more...

By Karen MacGregor. Recommendations for academic and research collaboration among the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are to be taken forward after a heads of state meeting in Russia in July adopted a BRICS Academic Forum vision paper. The proposals include easy visas for researchers and a fund similar to Europe’s Horizon 2020 to finance joint research. Read more...

By Geoff Maslen. Joyce Seitzinger is a digital learning expert whose background is as varied as her work as an education technologist. Although born in the Netherlands where she graduated with a degree in Celtic studies, she has lived in Germany, Ireland and Egypt, and then in 2006 she moved to the other side of the world to take up a job as an e-learning advisor for five years at New Zealand’s Eastern Institute of Technology. Read more...

By William Patrick Leonard. The mounting notoriety of the United States’ burgeoning student debt linked with the 2016 presidential election has drawn the attention of a growing number of announced candidates. Their foci appear to be an easy-to-understand remedy – the free college. Free or at least at low cost to the student. Read more...

By Artemios G Voyiatzis. A month later Greece’s members of parliament voted in, by a majority of more than two thirds, a new Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU, which was then signed by the European Commission on 19 August. Under this MoU, Greece will keep receiving financial assistance from euro area Member States and the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. In exchange, Greece must apply and enforce a wide-ranging austerity programme (officially a “financial adjustment”). Read more...

By Londa Schiebinger. Doing research wrong can cost lives and money. For example, between 1997 and 2000 10 drugs were withdrawn from the US market because of life-threatening health effects. Eight of these posed greater health risks for women than for men. Not only does developing a drug in the current market cost billions – but when drugs fail, they can cause human suffering and death. Read more...

By Simon Marginson. Last weekend the UK Home Secretary Theresa May wrote an article in The Sunday Times in which she proposed that European Union free movement should only apply to people who had already secured a job. Read more...